Crisis theories in the Dutch Left

In this third part of the series, we
are going to deal with one of the most important theoretical foundations of the
Dutch Left. From its origin at the begin­ning of this century, the Dutch Left
gave an interpretation of historical materialism which be­came a characteristic
mark of the ‘Dutch Marxist school' (Anton Pannekoek, Hermann Gorter, H. Roland-H­olst).
This interpretation of Marxist method is often called ‘spontaneism'. We will
show in this article why the term is inappropriate. Gorter and Pannekoeks'
position on the role of spontaneity allowed the Dutch Left to understand the
changes imposed on the class struggle with the onset of capitalist decadence.
At the same time, we can see certain weaknesses in Pannekoek which today's ‘councilists'
have pushed to their most absurd conclusions.

*********************

Marxism made a decisive
contribution to socialist theory in that unlike the utopian socialists, it did
not depart from arbitrary or dogmatic presuppo­sitions. Marxist theory in fact
departs from "real individuals, their
acts and the material conditions in which they live, those they find and at the
same time those they bring about by their own acts" (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology). Let us recall the
formulation on historical materialism in the ‘Preface to a Contribution of
Political Economy' by Marx:

"In the social production of their existence,
men enter into definite, necessary relations, which are independent of their
will, namely, relations of production corresponding to a determinate stage of
development of their material forces of production. The totality of these
relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real
foundation on which there arises a legal and political superstructure and to which
there correspond definite forms of social conscious­ness. The mode of
production of material life conditions the social, political and intellec­tual
life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines
their being, but on the contrary it is their social being that determines their
consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive
forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production
or -- what is merely a legal expres­sion for the same thing -- with the
property relations within the framework of which they have hitherto operated.
From forms of develop­ment of the productive forces these relations turn into
fetters. At that point an era of social
revolution begins. With the change in the economic foundation the whole immense
superstructure is more slowly or more rapidly transformed. In considering such
transforma­tions it is always necessary to distinguish between the material
transformation of the eco­nomic conditions of production, which can be
determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political,
religious, artistic or philosophic, in short, ideological, forms in which men
become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge
an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such an
epoch of transfor­mation by its consciousness, but, on the contr­ary, this
consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from
the existing conflict between the social forces cf production and the relations
of production. A social order never perishes before all the productive forces
for which it is broadly sufficient have been developed, and new sup­erior
relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions
for their existence have matured within the womb of the old society. Mankind
thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it can solve, since closer
examination will also show that the task itself arises only when the material conditions
for its solution are already pre­sent or at least in the process of formation.
In broad outline, the Asian, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of
production may be designated as progressive epochs of the socio-economic order.
The bourgeois rela­tions of production are the last antagonistic form of the
social process of production -- antagonistic not in the sense of an individual
antagonism but of an antagonism growing out of the social conditions of
existence of the individuals; but the productive forces deve­loping in the womb
of bourgeois society simultaneously create the material conditions for the
solution of this antagonism. The pre­history of human society therefore closes
with this social formation."

The
contribution of the Dutch Left to historical materialism

One can distinguish two
fundamental aspects of historical materialism that are indissolubly linked:

That there is a
relationship between being and consciousness, or in other words, between the
infrastructure and the superstructure.

That there is
necessarily a relationship bet­ween the development of the productive forces
and the relations of production.

It is from the
antagonism between the productive forces and the relations of production that
we can deduce the objective necessity for a commu­nist society. Marxist theory,
for which being determines consciousness, also allows one to understand how the
workers subjectively act in the process of revolution. The ‘Dutch Marxist school'
always put the emphasis on this subjective factor, on the relationship between
being and consciousness, on the relation between infra­structure and
superstructure. Rosa Luxemburg was just as keen to clarify the question of
class consciousness. In 1904 she opposed Lenin, who defended Kautsky's position
that conscious­ness was brought from outside in the class struggle and was not
a product of the struggle itself. For Rosa Luxemburg, faced with the
bureaucratization of German Social Democracy, this question was of central
importance. By basing herself on the history of the workers' movement in Russia, she showed that only the creative initiative of the large
proletarian masses could lead to victory.

"In general, the tactical policy of the
social democracy is not something that may be ‘invented'. It is the product of
a series of great creative acts of the often spontaneous class struggle seeking its way forward. The
uncons­cious comes before the conscious. The logic of the historic process
comes before the subjective logic of the human beings who participate in the
historic process."
(Rosa Luxemburg, Organizational Question
of Social Democracy)

Rosa Luxemburg and the
Dutch Left defended this position on the role of spontaneity for the masses
which has nothing to do with the spontan­eist position of today's ‘councilists'.
‘Spontan­eism' completely neglects the task of the most conscious elements in
the class: that conscious­ness once arisen from the experience of struggle
becomes the point of departure for future struggles. The spontaneists and the
councilists embrace proletarian experience only to reject it later.

The ‘Dutch Marxist
school', on the contrary, deepened the positions defended by Rosa Luxem­burg on
the role of spontaneity in the develop­ment of class consciousness. Gorter,
Pannekoek and Roland-Holst found in the work of Joseph Dietzgen, a first
generation social democrat, a development of Marx's basic conception that being
determines consciousness. They wrote many articles on Dietzgen's positions and
Gorter translated his most important work The
Essence of Human Intellectual Work[1] into Dutch.

The Dutch
Left thought it was necessary to stress the subjective aspects of historical
materialism because:

"The great revolutions
in modes of production (from feudalism to capitalism, from capita­lism to socialism)
happen because new neces­sities transform the mind of man and produce a will; when this will is translated into
acts, man changes society in order to respond to new needs." (Pannekoek, ‘Marxism
as Action', in Lichstrahlen, no.6, 1915)

These lines were written
at the time when the productive forces had clearly entered into contradiction
with capitalist relations of production; World War I had demonstrated the
decadence of capitalism in the most horrible manner. Social Democracy had been
shown incapable of adapting itself to the needs of the proletariat in the
period of decadence, in the epoch of wars and social revolutions.

"Today, the hour has come to underline the other aspect, neglected by Marxism
up to now, because the workers' movement must reorient itself, it must liberate
itself from the narrowness and passivity of the past period in order to
overcome its crisis." (Ibid)

However, while stressing
the subjective aspect of Marxism, Pannekoek neglected the objective aspect of
historical materialism. The contra­dictions, which were clearly present in the
economic base of society in the period of capi­talist decadence, were
neglected, denied, put aside for the future (later on we will look at Pannekoek's
critique of different crisis theories and the effects of his critique on today's
councilist epigones). Pannekoek feared that certain of the crisis theories
could lead the working class to passively wait for an ‘auto­matic' collapse of
the capitalist system. In the article of 1915 quoted above, Pannekoek pointed
out that Marxism has two aspects: "man is
the product of circumstances, but he also transforms the circumstances".
According to Pannekoek, these two aspects are: "... equally correct and important; it is only by their close
relationship that they form a coherent theory. But of course in different
circumstances one or other of these two aspects prevail" (Ibid). Thus in the difficult period of
the anti-socialist laws of 1878, 1890, when Bismarck put Social Democracy outside the law, the idea was to let
the circumstances mature. The strongly fatalistic turn taken by historical
materialism during those years was, according to Pannekoek, deliberately
maintained in the years preceding World War I. Kautsky said that a true Marxist
was one who let circumstances mature. The need for new methods of struggle
threatened the rou­tine habits of the leaders of the party. Panne­koek was
right when he stressed the need to put the emphasis on the subjective element
in histo­rical materialism, but in doing this he under­estimated the objective
evolution of capitalism. The proletariat must act consciously, pose new
problems, raise them and resolve them in the experience of struggle. Of course,
but why? What are these new problems? Why are they raised? Why the need for a new
society, for communism? Can capitalism still develop? What can it offer
humanity?

Pannekoek doesn't
provide the answers, not even insufficient or false ones. He didn't see clearly
that the objective change in capitalism, its decadence, posed the necessity for
the mass acti­vity of the proletariat. In the progressive development of
capitalism the objective of class struggle was in general limited; thus the
strug­gles for reforms led by the unions and parliamen­tary socialists were
adequate in the preceding period, but were no longer appropriate in the period
of decadence.

Crisis
theories

The answers to the
questions posed above are found in Marxist theories of crisis. By seeking to determine
the objective laws of capitalism's development, these theories have tried to
evaluate if the crises which have taken place are the crises of growth of an
ascendant mode of production in its prosperous period, or if, on the contrary,
these crises are expressions of a system in decline which must be consciously
replaced by a new revolutionary class.

On the basis of crisis
theories we can draw cer­tain important programmatic consequences, even if it
remains true that consciousness of the necessity to accelerate the evolution of
capita­lism through struggle is never the product of ‘purely economic'
arguments. Crisis theories clarify the process of class struggle. But at the
same time, this clarification is an important need of the struggle. A theory of
crisis provides revolutionaries with precious arguments against bourgeois ideology
in their task of stimulating class consciousness which develops through and in
the struggle. With theories of crisis, the working class could understand, for
example, that Proudhonist ideas of self-management do not in fact abolish wage
slavery. The Marxist theory of crisis combatted reformist illusions by show­ing
that reforms meant nothing more than a rela­tive amelioration in the situation
of the working class which at the same time pushed capitalist development
towards its final decadence. Today a Marxist theory of crisis shows the working
class that the struggle to defend its living standards can no longer be a
struggle for reforms when capitalism can no longer offer lasting improvements.

The fundamental unity of
these two aspects of historical materialism, the objective and the subjective,
appears very clearly in the work of Rosa Luxemburg. She doesn't simply put the
acc­ent on the role of the spontaneity of the masses in the development of new
methods of struggle, she also shows why these new tactics are necessary. In a
course given at the central school of the party in 1907, she pointed out that "the strong­est unions are completely
impotent" against the consequences that technical progress has on wages:

"The struggle against a relative fall in wages is no longer a struggle
within the con­text of a commodity economy but is becoming a revolutionary
attack against the very exis­tence of this economy; it is the socialist
movement of the proletariat. Hence the sympa­thies of the capitalist class for
the unions (even though previously it had struggled furiously against them) because
as the social­ist struggle begins, so the unions will turn against socialism."
(Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Intro­duction to Political Economy', ed. Antropos, 1970,
p.248)

In the Accumulation of Capital, Rosa Luxemburg
traces the historic limits of capitalist produc­tion in the development of the
world market. In the Communist Manifesto,
we already find the idea that cyclical crises, which for Marx and Engels were
an expression of the contradiction between the productive forces and the
relations of produc­tion, could only be surmounted by the conquest of new
markets, by the creation of the world market. In the German Ideology they call this creation of the world market "a universal inter­dependence, this first
natural form of the histo­rical world co-operation of individuals", a pre­condition
for the world revolution which will lead to the "control and conscious management of those forces which, though born of
the interac­tion of men have until now dazzled and dominated them". In Capital,
Marx explicitly says:

"In our description of how production relations are converted into
entities and rendered independent in relation to the agents of produc­tion, we
leave aside the manner in which the interrelations, due to the world-market,
its conjunctures, movements of market-prices, periods of credit, industrial and
commercial cycles, alternations of prosperity and crisis, appear to them as
overwhelming natural laws that irresistibly enforce their will over them, and
confront them as blind necessity. We leave this aside because the actual
movement of competition belongs beyond our scope, and we need present only the
inner organization of the capitalist mode of production, in its ideal average,
as it were." (Marx, Capital, vol.3,
part vii, chap.48)

This plan to simply
describe the internal organi­zation of capitalism was justified because capi­talism,
after the troubled revolutionary years of 1848-49, had entered into a long
period of pros­perity. Marx and Engels concluded "a new revolu­tion is only possible as a result of a new crisis. But it
is as certain as the crisis itself". Marx seemed to take account of the
fact that the per­iod of social revolution hadn't yet started and that
capitalism was still in its period of pro­gressive development. Capital demystifies the contemporary
bourgeois ideology which tried to mask the division of society into classes and
to present capitalism as an eternally progressive system.

Clearly Rosa Luxemburg
could not be satisfied with Marx's plan. She saw in the mass movements and in
imperialism the beginning of the end of the progressive era of capitalism. Her
study of the Accumulation of Capital enabled
her to write in the Program of the Communist
Party of Germany after World War I and in the midst of the German
revolution:

"The World War confronted society with a choice of two alternatives;
either the continued existence of capitalism, with its consequent new wars and
inevitable and speedy destruction due to chaos and anarchy, or the abolition of
capitalist exploitation.

With
the end of the World War the class rule of the capitalists lost its right to
existence. It is no longer capable of leading society out of the terrible
economic chaos which the imperialist orgy has left in its wake. (...) Only the
worldwide proletarian revolution can establish order in place of this anarchy." (Rosa Luxemburg, What
Does Spartacus Want?)

With the onset of the
period of decadence, all revolutionaries felt the need to develop a theory of
crisis in order to show the consequences of decadence on the class struggle:
Lenin, Bukharin, Luxemburg and Gorter (cf his pamphlet entitled Imperialism, World War and Social Democracy,
1915, and quoted in the first part of this series of articles). Pannekoek, who
more than others, had grasped the political implications of the change in
capitalism, remained firmly opposed to economic theories which sought to deduce
changes in the methods of proletarian struggle from objective causes. As we
will see, his criticism of theories of crisis unhappily contributed
very little to the development of class consciousness.

Pannekoek's critique of the theory of the
mortal crisis of capitalism

After the reflux in the
revolutionary struggle, the KAPD turned its attention towards developing a
theory of the ‘mortal crisis of capitalism'.

After years of almost
total silence, Pannekoek once more entered into the discussions going on within
the Dutch Left. In 1927, under the pseudonym of Karl Horner, he published an
article in Proletarier (organ of the
Berlin tendency of the KAPD) called ‘Principle and Tactic' (July/
August 1927). Refuting the theory of the ‘mortal crisis of capitalism',
Pannekoek defined the question of the crisis in a new way:

"What are the consequences for the develop­ment of revolution? Once more
the question of the ‘mortal crisis' comes to the fore, now clearly posed: are
we faced with an economic depression of such length that the reaction to it by
the proletariat will become perman­ent and lead to revolution? It is true that
the KAPD shares the position that capitalism can no longer return to a phase of
prosperity and has reached a final crisis that can no longer be resolved.
Because this question is very important for the tactics of the KAPD, it
requires a very profound examination."

Pannekoek quite rightly
remarked that the ‘mortal crisis of capitalism' goes back to the Accumula­tion of Capital by Rosa
Luxemburg, but he also said that this theory leads to conclusions which are not
drawn in the Accumulation of Capital because
"the book was published some years before
the war" (sic!). Then Pannekoek returned to his critique of the Accumulation of Capital published in
1913 and in one of the first issues of Proletarier.
In these criticisms, Pannekoek went into details about the schemas of
capitalist reproduction that are found in Capital,
vol. 2. We will not enter here into the debate on how Rosa Luxemburg and others
have interpreted Marx's schema. The essential question is that the schema must
be corrected, as we said above, a question never taken up by Pannekoek. Panne­koek
warned against the position which said that capitalism had reached a final
crisis because he thought that would lead to the adoption of short term
tactics. He thought that a new period of prosperity could not be excluded.

To argue this position,
he showed that new dis­coveries of gold could possibly stimulate demand again
and insisted that the emergence of East Asia was an independent factor in capitalist production. To the
extent that Pannekoek illus­trated the question of gold and East Asia by
referring to capitalism in the nineteenth century, he not only defended the
possibility of an econo­mic recovery (as the theory of the mortal crisis had
posed the problem), but he even denied that capitalism had entered a new phase
different from the phase of ascendancy and prosperity which the nineteenth
century had been a part of. The recovery of capitalist production which effec­tively
took place in the mid-thirties wasn't the result of discoveries of gold[2] but of a dis­covery which had the same outcome!

It wasn't the discovery
of new resources of gold which got the economy moving, but the discovery of the
stimulating role of the state in the economy through inflation. But from 1933
to the war this hardly stimulated any demand in the means of production and
consumption as the Keynesian ideology of state intervention claims, but mostly
in the means of destruction: war material, what a wonderful prosperity! In the
same way, the appearance of East Asia as an independent factor in capitalist production, took the
form of Japanese imperialism and the Berlin/Rome/Tokyo axis.

The ‘new period of
capitalist economic prosperity' predicted by Pannekoek, cannot be compared with
the conjunctural movements of prosperity and commercial crises of the
nineteenth century. The so-called ‘prosperity' of the war economy of the
mid-thirties was only an essential moment in the cycle of crisis, war,
reconstruction, crisis etc, characteristic of the historic period of the
decadence of capitalism. But, nevertheless, Pannekoek put his finger on the
question when he said that any eventual prosperity must lead to a more violent
crisis, which would provoke revolution again.

Decadence? Final crisis? The political consequences of the crisis according to the KAPD and the GIC

In the second part of
this article we saw how Pannekoek showed that from the beginning the ‘Unions'
were not unitary organizations and that it was preferable to abandon the ‘Unions'
for the party. Also, the question of knowing whether the ‘Unions' must organize
or support wage strug­gles wasn't the right question in his eyes. More
interesting for him was the question of knowing whether or not revolutionaries
must intervene in the wage struggles, and if so, how? In spite of all the
confusions on the tasks of the ‘Unions', we find in a text of the Essen
Tendency of the KAPD/AAUD on the ‘mortal crisis of capitalism' some very
valuable arguments on the imperious need to transform wage struggles into
struggles for the destruction of capitalism:

"Where the bourgeoisie's offensive of reducing workers' wages and living
conditions leads to a purely economic struggle by the affected group of
workers, this struggle almost with­out exception ends up in a victory for the
bosses and a defeat for the workers. The reason for the defeat of workers in
such struggles, despite tenacious and powerful strikes, lies once more in the
reality of the mortal crisis of capitalism (...). The outc­ome of these
defensive struggles for wages in the period of capitalism's mortal crisis is a
bitter but irreversible proof that the strug­gle for better wages and
conditions for wor­kers in the present phase of mortal crisis is a pure utopia;
and consequently the unions, as well,(whose only historic task was to take care
of the selling of labor power to the bourgeoisie) with all their aims, their
means of struggle and their forms of organization, have, because of the
historic process, become completely anachronistic and are therefore
counter-revolutionary structures. The trade unions know that with the collapse
of the capitalist economic system their vital role as sellers of proletarian labor
power will be over as will be the basis for that exchange. As a result, they try to
conserve capitalism's conditions of existence, which are at the same time their
own conditions of existence, by trading proletarian labor power for the lowest
price." (Proletarier, 1922)

Pannekoek paid close
attention to this economic argument. Pannekoek's article ‘Principle and Tactic'
had such a success in the organizations of the Dutch and German communist lefts
in the late 1920s that some tendencies started to see a contradiction between
discussing crisis theories and discussing class consciousness. Some tenden­cies
completely denied any need for a theoretical elaboration of the crisis. But
they all stuck to the position on ‘the crisis of capitalism' and the ‘decadence
of capitalism' formulated in the KAPD's program of 1920, from which they had
all originated. This was also the case with the Group of Communist
Internationalists (GIC) to which, from 1926, Pannekoek regularly contributed.
The GIC wrote this on the positions:

"The development of capitalism leads to increa­singly violent crises
which express themselves in an ever growing unemployment and greater and
greater dislocation of the productive apparatus, so that millions of workers
find themselves outside production and at the mercy of starvation. The
increasing impoverishment and uncertitude of existence force the working class
to start to struggle for the communist mode of production ..."

When Paul Mattick, after
the 1929 crash, made the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) adopt Grossman's
theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in their program (see the Mortal Crisis of Capitalism, Chicago,
1933) Pannekoek extended his critique of Rosa Luxemburg to Mattick's theory of
the crisis in a presentation which he made to the GIC and which was published.
Again he warned that the final collapse of capi­talism that Mattick talked about
could take place later than foreseen and that, fundamentally, only the working
class could put an end to capitalism. The GIC was in agreement with the
political consequences of Pannekoek's critique, and today we think that
revolutionary groups and elements can also be in broad agreement with these
consequences. In 1933 the GIC, in a pamph­let on ‘the movements of the
capitalist economy' engaged in a chicken and egg type discussion which
continues today between those who defend a theory of the crisis based on the
saturation of markets (Rosa Luxemburg) and those who defend a theory of the
crisis based on the tendency of the falling rate of profit (Bukharin/Lenin,
Grossman/ Mattick). In this pamphlet the GIC presents it­self as a supporter of
the falling rate of profit analysis but insists at the same time on a fact
stressed by the theory of the saturation of markets:

"The whole world has been made into a gigantic workshop. This means that
crises on the present level of specialization have an international character."

We can say that the GIC,
in its main lines, foll­owed Mattick's economic theory. But, at the same time,
the GIC put forward the same warning as Pannekoek:

"Particularly at the present time when there
is so much talk about the ‘mortal crisis' of capitalism, of the ‘final crisis'
in which we find ourselves, it is important to be aware of the essential characteristics of the
pre­sent crisis. Not to do so would mean submit­ting to all sorts of illusions
and surprises regarding the measures which the ruling class tries in order to
maintain the future devel­opment of the capitalist system. An ‘absolute'
collapse is expected, without taking into account what that means. One must say
that capitalism is stronger than was foreseen bec­ause the ‘absolute' collapse
hasn't happened, because a large part of economic life contin­ues to function.
Thus the transition from capitalism to communism isn't automatic but will
always be linked to the level of consc­iousness developed in the working class.
It is precisely because of this that the propa­ganda of principles is necessary." (De
bewegingen van het kaitalistische bedrijfs­leven, Permateriaal GIC, 6 Jg,
no.5)

And so,
in the following years, the GIC analyzed the measures of the bourgeoisie which
led to the development of the war economy. It showed that economic ‘planning'
lowered the standard of living of the working class without really over­coming
the crisis. Here is the conclusion of an article on economic ‘planning' in Holland:

"It is clear that the relations of property have entered into conflict
with the productive forces. And,
at the same time, this clearly shows that the problem cannot be resolved on the basis of capitalist production. The
problem can only be solved through a world 'economy' based on an international division
of labor, on communist foundations." (Radencommunisme, May 1936)

A second
article on this question demystified the social democratic ‘labor plans' which were part of the tendency towards
statification, and which followed the example of the fascist organization of
capital. The GIC showed that with the social democrats in power national defense
would be stimulated while at the same time the war economy created new
conditions of struggle for the workers: the purely economic struggles became useless
against the organized policy of prices and so were struggles for the
preservation of the dying, democratic bourgeois legal system. The GIC's
articles on Germany showed how, during the period of the Weimar Republic, social democracy and Russia's foreign policy brought about economic ‘planning', the
defeat of workers' struggles and preserved Germany's military might which could be perfected by the Nazis into
a fully functioning war machine.

From
Pannekoek to the Councilist Epigones

Let us return to Pannekoek's
‘disgust' for econo­mic theories of the crisis. In Workers' Councils, written during World War II, he treated the ques­tion
of the limits of capitalist development in a coherent and global manner.
Departing from the idea developed in the Communist
Manifesto about the expansion of capitalism on a world scale, Pannekoek
arrived at the conclusion that the end of capitalism would be approached:

"When tens of millions of people who live in the fertile plains of East Asia and the South are
pushed into the orbit of capitalism, the principal task of capitalism would
have been fulfilled." (P.
Aartsz, Workers' Councils, chap.II)

It is interesting to see
that Marx posed the same question in a letter to Engels (8.10.1858):

"The specific task of bourgeois society is
the establishment of a world market, at least in outline, and of production
based upon this world market. As the world is round, this seems to have been
completed by the coloniza­tion of California and Australia and the opening up of China and Japan. The difficult question for us is this: on the
Continent the revolution is imminent and will immediately assume a socialist
character. Is it not bound to be crushed in this little corner, considering
that in a far greater territory the movement of bourgeois society is still in
the ascendant?"

But in his article on China in the same years, (published in the New York Daily Tribune), Marx responded to this question in the
negative.

Today, 120 years later,
Pannekoek's epigones continue to defend the idea that capitalism still has a
great task to fulfill in Asia[3]. While Marx in the 1850s showed that American and Brit­ish
expectations concerning the development of trade with the opening up of China
were greatly exaggerated, today, the bourgeoisie of the US bloc has already
reached this conclusion concer­ning the recent re-opening up of China to the
western bloc: the western bourgeoisie merely provides military equipment in
preparation for a third world war and even sees its trade diminish given the
restricted nature of the Chinese mar­ket. Today, the crisis is there. Nobody
with sense would dare to claim that it doesn't exist.

Today's councilists,
like Daad en Gedacht would leave one
to understand that capitalism is free of crises, if not in words, then at least
by their silence on the present crisis. Is that an exaggeration on our part?
This is what Cajo Brendel claims in reply to our criticisms (in Wereld Revolutie):

"I thought I knew the positions of Daad en Gedacht to some degree. I want
to know where Daad en Gedacht has
ever written something which could justify this position. As far as I know Daad en Gedacht takes exactly the
opposite position by saying that capitalism cannot be crisis-free (...) It is
one thing to say that there cannot be a crisis-free capitalism and quite
another to speak of a ‘permanent crisis' or a ‘mortal crisis' of capitalism or
something like that. Already the GIC, in the thirties, not only presumed but
also proved with arguments that the permanent crisis didn't exist. I agree with
this, but whoever interprets this as a belief in a crisis-free capitalism show,
in my opinion, that he has understood nothing of this position ..."

We also think we know a
bit about the positions of Daad en
Gedacht insofar as they are found in their publications! Perhaps we don't
read very well, but nowhere do we find that there can't be a crisis-free
capitalism. Apart from the pamphlet Beschouwingen
over geld en goud (a repetition of the Marxist labor theory of value and
functions of money and gold), we haven't found a single article on economic
subjects for the last ten years. This silence on the crisis seems to be one of
the principles of this group!

So, what do we
understand by the ‘permanent crisis' and ‘mortal crisis', terms which were
developed by the German Left? Do we defend the idea that the collapse, the
death of capitalism is as certain as a physical phenomenon in a laboratory?
That's not what we think.

If the term ‘permanent
crisis' means something, it is because it refers to a whole period of
capitalism, the period of decadence, in which the cycle
crisis-war-reconstruction-crisis ... has replaced the periodic and conjunctural
cycle of commercial crises and crises of prosperity in the ascendant period of
capitalism. Of course, there isn't a mortal crisis in the sense of an automatic
collapse of capitalism; capitalism's solution is world war if the proletariat
doesn't act in a revolutionary way. Capitalism could come out of crisis while
it was in a period of development because it could still penetrate new geographic
areas, a possibility suggested by Cajo Brendel in his book on Spain and China. But Cajo Brendel and Daad
en Gedacht aren't interested in this question. Their study of many
so-called ‘bourgeois revolutions' (Spain ‘36, China) depart from a national framework and not from the
internationalist framework which was the deter­mining factor for Marx and
Pannekoek (cf Workers' Councils by
Pannekoek), even if Pannekoek made a different response to this question.

It is this
internationalism of Pannekoek and of the international communist left of which
the Dutch Left was a part before slowly degenerating, that we lay claim to.

Today when the open
crisis of world capitalism is a flagrant reality, it is important to deepen the
contributions of the Dutch Left. If it was tentative, multi-faceted and diverse
in its elaboration of the theory of capitalist crisis, it at least exposed the
problems and contributed to the enriching of Marxist theory even if it didn't
resolve them. Above all it maintained the essentials: its class loyalty to the
commun­ist revolution, to internationalism, to proletarian principles.

[2] "Because gold, alone of the
products of labor, has the specific power to buy without having been sold in
the first place, it can be the point of departure of the cycle and put it into
movement." (Karl Horner, ‘Principle and Tactic', Proletarier, 1927)

[3] See the ICC's critique on ‘Theses of the Chinese Revolution' by
Cajo Brendel in the ‘Epigones of Councilism', Part II, International Review, no. 2.